If I am speaking about a letter that has a diacritical mark (e.g. 'á'), what word or phrase should I use to reference the base letter (e.g. 'a')? I'm looking for something a little more concise than ...

Why does English omit diacritics from foreign names that still use the Latin alphabet? For example, why are the Czech tennis player Tomáš Berdych, the Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø, or the Polish ...

Why doesn't the English language have accent marks?
I have been trying to understand the critical differences that are present between the English and Spanish language, however I just can not wrap my ...

It just occured to me that there are words in English that have two different meanings, two different pronunciations and are written exactly the same.
For example "present" can be interpreted as the ...

If you look at texts from a few hundred years ago, they’re almost illegible, what with all the superfluous e’s and y’s running about, the long-S’s ( ſ ), and so on. Texts from 100 and 120 years ago ...

I have a relation who has named their child Zoe, on the grounds that “in English we don’t use the dots”, but they pronounce it like the second version.
Of course I don’t want to argue that’s not the ...

There is some historical usage of diacritics in English, like naïve, résumé or even façade. I've been once told that these are used to mark a different spelling, and it may be used like in coöperative ...

One of our users, Stan Rogers, mentioned there was such a distinction, I think, when he answered a question and talked about how the orthography of foreign loan-words typically changes to conform with ...

I am writing a paper where I will cite several works by the Hungarian mathematician Gábor Szegő. Note that his surname includes the letter o with a double acute accent, NOT a letter o with umlaut ö. ...

I know that diacritics are often retained in loanwords in formal writing (cf. naïveté), but I haven't seen this done with direct adaptation of Latin words; i.e., per se.
In Latin, per sē comes with a ...

Can anyone provide me with the etymology and details of usage of the word charlâtanerie ? I came across this word while reading The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe.The following passage ...

Is there a term that covers grave and acute accents, umlauts, cedillas, tildes and all other characters that can be added to normal letters.
I have come across the word diacritics. But this seems to ...

In my understanding, many European cultures have compensated for the lack of certain characters on keyboards (especially old typewriters) by “anglicizing” some characters. For example, the German ß ...